The present invention relates generally to the field of application server software, and more particularly to dynamic management of endpoints within application server software that comply with representational state transfer protocol.
Representational state transfer (REST) is an architectural style consisting of a coordinated set of architectural constraints applied to components, connectors, and data elements, within a distributed hypermedia system. Environments and endpoints that comply with the restraints of the REST abstraction are called “RESTful” environments and endpoints. REST includes several formal architectural constraints including (i) a uniform interface separating clients from servers, and (ii) stateless protocol (i.e., each request from any client contains all the information necessary to service the request). A RESTful endpoint is a connection point that manages access to one or more resources (i.e., a source of information that can be addressed using a uniform resource identifier (URI), such as a URL). RESTful endpoints exchange representations of resources to which they address. A representation is a document containing data provided by the resource, including associated metadata. When a resource identified by the URI is accessible by one or more clients, the endpoint is said to be “exposed.” A common approach to exposing RESTful endpoints is through static applications, such as enterprise archive (EAR) files or web application archive (WAR) files, where the endpoints are pre-defined during the compilation of the code.
The World Wide Web evolved from a system of linked static hypertext documents to a system of linked pages that can include dynamic updates of webpages using web applications and scripting languages, such as JavaScript®, and mark up languages, such as XML®. Web application servers, or application servers, efficiently execute procedures (e.g., programs, routines, and scripts) for supporting the web applications that the web application server supports.